Christmas Cards through the years... 2011

Now this year's 'card' (actually a book) started when my friend ND donated 12 scallops shells to me in November. I took them home and got busy thinking about what I could do with them...

Assemblage of materials:
Started collecting... the shells, pieces of mat board cut in various sizes, abalone shell my daughter brought back from her time in New Zealand, hand painted tissue papers in pinks and purples, and ripped pages out of the Lonely Planet Dominican Republic travel guide (picking particular pages that were about beaches around the island that were then painted browns and pinks, and stamped with shell images).

Glued four layers of mat board into a little platform to even out the bottom, so the book would lay flat.

Tops and bottoms...

The travel book pages were folded into a four-fold booklet. The abalone shell was glued onto the front cover to act as a weight. And inside was the coloured tissue paper with the Christmas message "shells...  beaches...  winter warmth...  Wishing you a winter break, even if only in your mind!"

Now isn't that 'ooh and aah' worthy!

Christmas Cards through the years... 2010

Inspired by the book Stitching The Textured Surface by Lynda Monk and Carol McFee, these pages are made with molding paste over Lutradur, dyed and coloured, then burnt back.

I especially like the quotes I selected this year!

These cards have large brass initials on the front BUT I was liking the smooth stones I brought home from the beaches of Vancouver Island BC last summer that I was using as weights for the gluing down of the initials so much that I forgot to get a photograph of the final products!

Nice rocks though, eh?
Don't they make you want to skip some stones!

Christmas Cards through the years... 2009

2009 was the biggest, most time consuming 'card' I have ever done!

A structure inspired by Leilani Pierson in a Cloth, Paper, Scissors magazine, I worked my way around the colour wheel producing 10 books with six double-sided pages in various papers and fabrics. These were collaged (paper term) or appliqued (fibre term) with beads, buttons, keys, phrases torn out of magazines, tin shapes, yarns, fabric scraps, shells, miniature cloths pegs, washers and charms.

This was made to commemorate my Book Making group which has been meeting every month for the past 12 years.

Here is the layout of one book showing each collaged page and its reverse. Repeat this for 9 other colourways!

Laying flat, you can see the bulk of the pages.

And lined up to see the colours.

I was really happy with how these turned out, and everyone was thrilled to receive one in the group!

Christmas Cards through the years... 2008

Belonging as I do, to the local calligraphy guild (in Calgary it is the Bow Valley Calligraphy Guild - one of the largest in North America), it is de rigueur to hand make a Christmas card. And since joining in 1994 I have done so every year.

They started as actual calligraphic card - with the lettering and wording more important - usually colour photocopied to make multiple copies, or perhaps gocco-ed. Over the years, as I moved into Book Arts, they became more about the structure as each one was handmade and more time consuming - hence the production numbers went way down. (Originally I would make 75 cards, I am now down to 12 at the most.)

Here are images of them for the past four years...
(one at a time)

Assemblage of materials:
(Picking colour coordinated papers = hand painted + various Japanese tissues + Thai stitched ones. Along with linen threads, beads and sequins, grommets, copper tags, date stamp.)

The final card:
(Design idea inspired by a Kathy Guthrie card she once gave me for my birthday. Hanging on a vertical string, layers of papers with name tag at the bottom.)

Packaging into an 'envelope':
(Plastic CD sleeve with the slit in front for the copper tag with recipients name stamped on.)

You can click on images for more details...
More to come.